


the fears that i've discovered

by mcmaynaiz



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Book 7: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Gen, Not Canon Compliant, Vernon Dursley Being an Asshole
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-03
Updated: 2020-09-03
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:55:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26272966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mcmaynaiz/pseuds/mcmaynaiz
Summary: Deathly Hallows, only Dudley is accidentally separated from his parents and left stuck with Harry, Ron and Hermione on the hunt for the Horcruxes. He has to get used to magic, and quick, but not only that - he must confront the very real possibility that he could be killed for being who he is, and the only person he has to rely on is his cousin. Whom he bullied for the majority of their lives, This is going to be awkward.
Relationships: Dudley Dursley & Harry Potter
Comments: 9
Kudos: 33





	the fears that i've discovered

**Author's Note:**

> This is rather self indulgent but I'm having fun writing it. Hope someone enjoys!

“Boy!”

Harry groaned, rubbing his forehead. His scar was hurting again, sending searing shocks of pain down his temples, and the last thing he wanted was to hear Vernon bluster. Cursing under his breath, he reluctantly got up from where he had been sitting on his bed and stumbled down the stairs towards the source of the shout.

Uncle Vernon was stood waiting at the bottom of the stairs, bright red, sweating, and fidgeting. As Harry drew nearer, he looked up at him and scowled. 

“I’ve changed my mind. We’re not leaving this house! Twenty years we’ve lived here, me and Petunia both, and you’re suggesting we leave on account of you and your sort! How do we know this is even true, what you’re saying about that Lord Whats-His-Face, what you’re saying about us being in danger? I won’t have it -”

“How can you not understand yet? If you stay here, I have no way of guaranteeing your safety. Believe me or don’t believe me, but Voldemort is out there and he hates Muggles even more than you hate my sort. And if he realises you’re related to me, you become an obvious target. He will KILL you -”

“Poppycock! I don’t believe a word of it!” Vernon was starting to turn an odd sort of purple/red colour combination. As his volume rapidly increased, he began to shake with self righteous fury. Spittle flew out of his mouth and into Harry’s face with every exclamation. 

“Right, then,” Harry said tiredly, looking over Vernon’s shoulder to his aunt, who was stood in the kitchen doorway, watching the confrontation with an odd expression on her face. Harry thought she looked different to the other times she had seen him and Vernon argue. Instead of having a smug little smirk creeping across her face, or glaring at him as though he were a disgusting kind of household pest, she just looked blank. Like she was looking, but not really seeing. When she noticed Harry looking at her, however, she quickly schooled her face back into familiar territory, and he found himself locked in a sort of stare down. “What do you think, Aunt Petunia?”

She scoffed. “Well of course, Vernon is right. I’m not leaving my home. Whatever this situation is about, it has nothing to do with us. We have nothing to do with your kind, you know that.”

“Whether you like it or not, you DO have something to do with magic. We’re related” at this point Vernon muttered something along the lines of wishing they weren’t, “WE’RE RELATED, whether you like it or not, and this isn’t a risk any one of you should be willing to take.”

Petunia said nothing in reply, just glared at him. He stared back at her and wondered, not for the first time, how he could be related to someone like her. Not only that, but with her knowing how Voldemort had brutally murdered his parents, and taking into consideration that this had then forced her to have to raise him, Harry didn’t understand how she was taking this so lightly. Surely she was all too aware of how catastrophic this could be.

But as he looked at her, stood very rigidly, crossing her arms and gripping her elbows tightly, face scrunched up in a look of contempt, he realised that she wasn’t stupid. She was terrified. Her world was imploding and the only way she could think to keep herself together was to blank it out and pretend nothing was happening. No, they would be fine. Vernon would go to work as usual and bring home enough money to support their lifestyle, keep them comfortable. Dudley would go back to Smeltings, where he was well liked and absolutely not feared, and enjoy his final year while excelling academically. And she would stay home, right there in No. 4 Privet Drive, safe in her little bubble, just like Dudley and Vernon would be, the three of them safe from harm. They were perfectly normal people, after all. 

He sighed and the fight left him. He was so tired. 

“Fine”, he stated wearily, and made to go back upstairs.

“Fine?” exclaimed Vernon, seeming rather astonished. He seemed to realise this though, and quickly tried to reclaim hold of the situation, saying “Fine” again in a tone that he probably thought made him seem dignified, but Harry privately thought made him sound constipated.

Harry nodded and went upstairs. 

When he reached the landing something grabbed hold of his sleeve and pulled him around the corner. Harry yelped and went to draw his wand, before he came face to face with his would - be attacker and realised it was Dudley.

“What?” Dudley asked defensively.

“Merlin, don’t do that. What do you want?”

Dudley squinted at him and Harry realised he probably looked insane, using a wizarding expletive like that when before he’d been so careful (mostly) to avoid reminding the Dursleys that he wasn’t Muggle like them. It was more convenient after all.

He seemed to move past it rather quickly though, simply casting him an odd look and starting to speak in a tone Harry wasn’t used to hearing from Dudley. It was low and urgent and not at all like the loud, whiny voice that had got him his way so many times before.

“Are we staying or leaving then?” 

“I have no idea.” Thinking the discussion over, Harry turned to leave, but Dudley caught his elbow again. “What?”

“Well what did they say?”

“I would have thought you would have heard most of it. Your dad isn’t exactly quiet.”

Dudley grunted. “Heard some of it. Missed some as well.”

“They just said they weren’t leaving, they won’t have it, they don’t care about my sort and our conflicts -”

“So we’re staying then?”

“I just said, I don’t know! Maybe? Either way people are coming to pick you up, so it’s going to be awkward explaining that no, you don’t care about the threat of a mass murderer who has an agenda not only against me, but against all non - magical people, and you’d rather stay right where you are -”

“Who said I don’t care?”

Harry was caught off guard by that. “Well, who says you do?”

Dudley shrugged. 

They stood there for a second rather awkwardly, until Harry realised he wasn’t going to answer, and went back to his room. He threw himself down onto his bed and stared up at the ceiling, plain white, same as always. Over on his dresser Hedwig hooted softly, and he managed to expend enough energy to turn his head sideways to give her a fond smile. 

“You’re the only sane one in this house,” he told her solemnly. “Including me, I suppose, since I’m talking to an owl.” 

Hestia and Daedalus arrived just as Vernon had finished unpacking the last of their belongings from the car. They wandered in, making pleasantries that fell on deaf ears, and only seemed to realise something wasn’t quite right when they looked around the room, seeing that nothing had been packed. 

“Ah, um, are we packed and ready to go?” Daedalus inquired nervously. Vernon took this as a personal slight, the very idea that one of Harry’s sort felt obliged to order him around his own house, and immediately began one of his famous rants.

“No, we are NOT ready to go, because we aren’t going! I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, we are not leaving this house! I bought this place myself and legally cannot be forced to vacate it! I don’t care what rubbish you people make up to get us to leave it, it won’t work! I’ve made my decision and that's final!”

“Oh yes, just like all those other final decisions,” Harry supplied dully. 

Vernon turned an impressive shade of puce. “Don’t speak to me like that boy!”

It took at least an hour to talk Vernon down and leave him even slightly susceptible to the idea of leaving again. Hestia did most of the negotiating, given that she appeared to be rather more normal than Daedalus, in his purple robes and top hat. She went to the kitchen to make them all a cup of tea, and well, if Harry saw her spell it right from her wand into the cups, well, what the Dursleys didn’t know couldn’t hurt them. He hissed an apology to her there for their rude behaviour, and she assured him that he had nothing to apologise for, but he still felt rather guilty. Nobody from the wizarding world besides Dumbledore had actually had to deal with the Dursleys for an extended period of time before, and Dumbledore had handled it in such a typically Dumbledore way that Harry hadn’t had much time to feel embarrassed. But this was different. He pushed down the wave of emotion that threatened to overtake him at the thought of Dumbledore. The last thing he needed right now was more suffering to focus on. 

Hestia sat and listened to Vernon rant and rage about his house and what it meant to him. She hummed and hawwed in all the right places, and barely spoke herself. This proved to be the right approach, as by the time he was done complaining he seemed to have talked himself back into it. Harry didn’t know whether this was the result of his own indecisiveness, or if Hestia had hit him with a sly Confundus, but either way he was relieved. 

“I suppose we’d better pack up again then,” grumbled Vernon, and he left the room. Harry resisted the urge to laugh, but Aunt Petunia seemed to know exactly what he was thinking and shot him a dirty look as she swept out of the room. Harry followed and as he entered the hall he saw Dudley nearly collide into Uncle Vernon as he came down the stairs.

“Go and get your stuff together son, we’re leaving.”

Dudley blinked. “We are?”

“Yes,” Vernon mumbled, clearly embarrassed, and carried on up the stairs. 

At this moment the doorbell rang, and as much as the sound filled Harry with joy, knowing his friends were almost certainly on the other side, it also filled him with dread, knowing that he was now going to have to watch them try to be polite to the Dursleys, while they did their utmost best to be rude back. 

Harry opened the door with trepidation. As Ron and Hermione immediately grabbed him and pulled him into a hug, laughing and slapping him on the back, he forgot all of those bad thoughts, and focused only on them and the sound of their voices. He had missed them. He always did, but this time had been the worst of all. Knowing that the war was on their doorstep had really made any of the summer hard to enjoy, and trying to convince the Dursleys that they were unsafe was especially depressing, as he had to constantly affirm that they were all in grave danger. But for now he ignored that niggling thought in the back of his head, reminding him he could be attacked at any moment, and simply said hello to his friends. 

As they pulled away from one another and the Order members began to flow in past them, Harry greeting them all individually, he became hyperaware of the fact that Dudley was still stood at the bottom of the stairs, and was staring at him, Ron and Hermione as though they were an exhibition at the zoo. Harry thought of the snake. He did so hope it got back to Brazil. 

He supposed it was probably weird for Dudley, seeing Harry with his friends. For so long he had had none, Dudley chasing them all away with threats of violence and actual violence. And whilst everything changed with that Hogwarts letter, Dudley hadn’t been there to see it. Harry was simply someone who lived in his second bedroom for a few weeks out of the year, rather than a whole fleshed out person with a life of his own. Sometimes Harry thought Dudley still saw him as the little freak boy who lived in the cupboard under the stairs.

“Hi Dudley,” Ron said rather sheepishly, with an odd little wave, and Harry immediately remembered that his last interaction with Dudley had resulted in Dudley’s tongue being spelled ten feet long. Clearly Dudley remembered this as well, as he responded with a pained  
“Errrm” and then scurried back upstairs. Ron snorted, as did Fred and George, whom Harry realised had watched the whole scene with glee. 

“Reckon he remembers us?” said George cheerily, clapping Harry on the back. “Hello Harry, by the way.”

“You alright?” asked Fred, throwing an arm around him. “And more importantly, where is your loo? I’d really rather not repay your relatives generous hospitality by accidentally urinating on their floor.” 

“That way,” Harry pointed him in the right direction, amused. 

“Right then, you lot,” Mad-Eye’s voice boomed from in the sitting room. “Get in here and let's try to make this quick. You all know why we’re here and what we’re doing. But what I’m not sure you know is the level of danger you are potentially going to be facing. We’re fairly sure that You Know Who doesn’t know we’re moving tonight, but don’t take this as confirmation of your safety. Information can and does leak, and it's likely that he will have a few guards on patrol anyway - he’d be stupid not to. So above all, remember: constant vigilance!”

“How will we be travelling?” asked Harry.

While Mad - Eye explained why they couldn’t apparate or use the Floo, Harry entertained himself by watching Uncle Vernon try to carry as many boxes as he could out to the car and nearly fall over under their weight. He was oddly glad that they would be flying; as inconvenient as it was he was excited to be back on a broom. 

“Great, just let me go get my broom -”

“Not so fast boy! I haven’t even explained the precautions we’ll be taking to keep you safe.”

“What precautions? Oh, no.”

Hermione had pulled out a vial of a disgusting looking potion which was pretty reminiscent of mud, only full of bubbles. Harry recognised it immediately as Polyjuice Potion. 

“You see, instead of there being one Harry Potter flying through the sky, easy for the Death Eaters to identify, there will be Seven.

“No! I won’t, I can’t let you! Are you mad? Nobody else is risking their lives for me -”

“Oh SHUT UP, Harry!”

Harry turned to Hermione in astonishment, and she had the good graces to flush red, but her expression remained determined. He looked at Ron, hoping for him to agree, but he only shrugged and said “It’s for your own good, mate.”

“We’re not thrilled about it either”, said George in an easy tone.  
“Yeah, imagine we get stuck as little speccy gits forever.” joked Fred.

“Yeah”, muttered Mundungus. “Some of us are really not on board with this at all -”  
“Shut up!” barked Mad-Eye. “Now Harry, give us a hair for this potion.”

x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x

Meanwhile, Dudley was upstairs slowly packing his things for the umpteenth time this week. He had genuinely not considered that it could go this far. Yes; he’d been told that he and his family were in danger, but even after everything that had happened he didn’t really think it could be true. No. 4 Privet Drive wasn’t a place where things like this happened. It wasn’t a dangerous place at all. It was where his mum had kissed his scraped knees and where he played violent video games and where he’d spent his entire childhood. It was just a normal house on a normal street full of normal people. Well, besides his cousin, of course.

Dudley really didn’t know what to make of him. It was so easy to agree with his parents; to simply concur that Harry was a liar, a troublemaker, a freak. He’d tried so desperately to cling onto the hope that he was making everything up, and Dudley would be returning to Smeltings as normal and that nothing would change. But every time he worked on keeping up this false hope he remembered that night in that alley, where Harry had saved him. He remembered the things he had seen and heard because of the Dementy thingies, and he knew deep down that Harry was not to blame for any of this, and probably never had been.

He finished packing, and brought the last of his boxes to the bottom of the stairs. His dad picked all five of them up at once, with great effort, and staggered off to the car, grunting and cursing as he did. His mum scuttled past him looking harried, her arms full of various knick knacks.

“I’m just going out back for a bit of fresh air mum. I won’t be too long.”

“Of course dear, whatever you’d like.”

x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x

With a large amount of cajoling, Harry was persuaded to surrender one of his hairs. Mad-Eye dropped it straight into the potion and it turned a brilliant shade of gold, which resulted in a lot of teasing for Harry. Hermione took the first swig, then Ron, and as the potion was passed around people started shifting to be identical to him in a sort of chain reaction. There was a lot of laughter and even more teasing.

“Merlins saggy left testicle, how has Voldemort not murdered you yet Harry? Can you even see him coming? He must be more useless than we thought.”

“How do you reach ANYTHING, ever?”

“Ooooh, look at me, I’m Harry Potter, I defeated the Dark Lord as a baby and I’m about to do it again -” 

“Shut up, Ron!”

“What are you going to do, bite my ankles-”

That earned him a swift friendly smack to the back of the head. They grinned at each other even so and Harry serendipitously shuffled closer to him. It was nice to have friends.

“M’ just off to the loo,” announced Mundungus, who was the last one of the chosen Potters left in his regular body. He was clutching the vial with the last dreg of Polyjuice in it. “Been having toilet troubles as of late n I’d really rather deal with it while still in my own body, if you catch my drift.”

Harry balked and everyone murmured in agreement.

x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x

Dudley stood just outside the French doors that led from the back garden into the kitchen, breathing in the cool night air. He couldn’t stand another second in that house. It was both familiar and completely foreign to him. He’d looked at his favourite sofa spot where he’d always curled up with his Gameboy, and saw it occupied by a rugged old wizard with a terrifying magical eye. He’d looked at his bedroom, which was usually his sanctuary, and saw only an empty room, with bare walls. It felt clinical, detached.

Like Harry’s room does, his brain supplied unhelpfully.

That was another thing that felt different. His cousin. For the entire time he’d lived with Harry, he hadn’t given much thought to his life. When Harry was at home, he was the boy they didn’t really like but had to keep around, the boy who mowed the lawn and did the dishes and weeded the garden. He didn’t know who Harry was when he wasn’t at home. Nor had he cared.

But in there, watching Harry surrounded by people, all of them talking to him and laughing with him and genuinely seeming to like him, the balance felt thrown off. Dudley grimaced. 

As he did the door slid open and out stepped a funny looking little man. The first thing Dudley noticed was that he stank, of both sour body odour and cheap alcohol. The second thing he noticed was that he was pointing that stick (a wand, his brain chimed in again) directly at him. The third thing he noticed was that he shouted the word “Imperio”. 

After that, he stopped noticing much of anything, really. 

“Your name is Mundungus Fletcher,” the man said. “You should drink this potion.” 


End file.
